Evidence? Ha. That’s for humanists, scientists and who knows what other dangerous?ists. It’s all about how we feel now

A vehicle and the surrounding area are engulfed in flames after it was set on fire inside the US consulate compound in Benghazi. Photograph: Str/AFP/Getty Images

Remember the Information Age? That was such an interesting period, when digital technology and the thirst for understanding converged to give the human race unprecedented access to heaps of revealing data, contemporaneous and historical. All you had to do was analyze the information without prejudice and the secrets of the world unfolded before you ? from the human genome to weekend crime in your town, from the value of the two-out stolen base to the origin of the universe. Continue reading “Who needs facts? We appear to be in the Post-Information Age now”

Glenn Greenwald, a writer for The Guardian, at home in Rio de Janeiro.
This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key ? allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key ? but she didn?t think much would come of it. Continue reading “How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets”

Half of Indians have no toilet. It’s one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India’s economic boom

The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction as he approaches his 80th birthday. Few intellectuals have combined academic respect and comparable influence on global policy. Few have garnered quite such an extensive harvest of accolades: in addition to his?Nobel prize?and more than 100 honorary degrees, last year he became the first non-US citizen to be awarded the?National Medal for the Humanities.An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions by Jean Dreze, Amartya Sen
But Sen doesn’t do satisfaction. He does outrage expressed in the most reasonable possible terms. What he wants to know is where more than 600 million Indians go to defecate. Continue reading “Amartya Sen: India's dirty fighter”

Gazi Nafis Ahmed’s photographs of clothing factory workers in Bangladesh reveal some of the grinding poverty and ever-present dangers they face day after day. Nafis is an alumni of Pathshala South Asian Media Institute and in the VII Mentor Program

Better redress is to never forget

If Cameron feels real contrition he should make teaching of the British empire a compulsory part of the GCSE history syllabus

David Cameron at the Golden temple in Amritsar this week. He declined to apologise for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, but said we must ‘learn lessons’. Photograph: Munish Sharma/Reuters

On 13 April 1919 a large group of Punjabis protesting against British rule gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. They were incensed at the arrest of two of their leaders, and for 24 hours the city had been consumed by riots. At five in the afternoon, General Reginald Dyer marched into Jallianwala Bagh with 140 troops, most of them Gurkhas, but with a few Sikhs and Baluchis as well. Having blocked the exits, they fired into the peaceful and unresisting crowds until they had exhausted all their ammunition. Official estimates put the casualties at 379 killed and 1,200 injured. Popular estimates put the casualties as much as 10 times higher. Continue reading “Amritsar Massacre. Cameron in India”

We?ve been covering Demotix since their controversial launch in 2008 and frankly the jury at the time was out on whether they really could create what many had tried and failed to do: a crowd-sourced, breaking news pictures and video agency with a viable business model. Other startups had come and gone in that space, partly because they had focused too much on camera phones. Those images might have been ?on the ground?, but they didn?t turn into businesses which interested major news outlets. We saw Twitpic stumble as it tried this last year, for instance. But Demotix went after real photographers close to the scenes of breaking news. And that question appears to to have been answered today as they hit a million images produced on the platform. Continue reading “Demotix Hits A Million Images”

Ali Abunimah
Ali Abunimah is author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He is a co-founder of the online publication The Electronic Intifada and a policy adviser with Al-Shabaka.

The Guardian and its sister paper, The Observer, are regarded as leading left-leaning news sources [GALLO/GETTY]

Something has gone badly wrong at The Guardian. In the name of “robust debate”, the venerable left-leaning liberal newspaper has effectively given its stamp of approval to speech that goes beyond mere hate, speech that clearly crosses the line into incitement to murder unarmed civilians and journalists. What lies behind this worrying development, and what does it tell us about the state of media in general?On 15 August, the Guardian announced the hiring of Joshua Trevi?o as a correspondent with the paper’s US politics team. Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of the Guardian US, said that Trevi?o would bring “an important perspective” to readers.
Trevi?o is a Republican party operative, paid political consultant and ideologue for hire. But while some may not like those attributes, they would not make him unique among columnists. What does distinguish Trevi?o is his propensity to call for violence. Continue reading “What's gone wrong at The Guardian?”

If you think that 24/7 tracking of citizens by biometric recognition systems is paranoid fantasy, just read the industry newsletters

A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy ? with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were ? so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.(photo: Flickr user Flatbush Gardener)
Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.
Except that it?turned out to be true.?News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government ? for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd. Continue reading “The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology”

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